a bargain, please God

just this once, then I'll never bother you again

My dearest Mila,

It’s 4:06 a.m. I’ve been up for a couple of hours already, mostly lying in bed until I finally got up, surrendering to my thrashing mind. Sleep was no contender to this pain. I lied in bed, pitch darkness on this cloudy and rainy night, trying to conjure up some feeling and connection to you. I tried to feel your hair in my hands, the heavy weight of it when I would gather it all up in a ponytail and flop it around your head. The feeling of my fingers combing through it, giving little gentle tugs on your roots - just as you liked me, too.

I sang you your lullaby but heard the words differently now. Don’t go to sleep. Don’t go to sleep. But the birds are still calling out your name. I just wonder if you hear it now.

I feel so lost. Some days I am betrayed by tears that will not come. Some days I am at their unrelenting mercy. Where are you? Where are you? Why are you gone?

In my fantasy, we are not coasting through life unscathed. I’ve seen too much pain and hardship to know that such isn’t life at all, not ours anyhow. What your dad and I do know is that steadfast devotion, even through the worst of miseries, delivers us. Maybe we don’t come out where we thought we would. Maybe what looked like a good outcome at the time is revealed to be naive. And often it is that after the passage of time and the ability to look back with wonder, we can see the wisdom of our guiding Creator. But here, in this world, I find no wisdom and I know it will forever be a question unanswered.

In my fantasy, your friends, any one of them, tells us you’re in trouble. We get a sucker punch, maybe two. We are thrown off-kilter, but that’s ok, we do what we always do, we rally. We get over whatever we need to get over. There is work to do! We make phone calls. We do research. We talk to you. We hold you in our arms and warm you in our home and we love you until your every pore is saturated. We protect you. We  make more phone calls. We research more. We have the answers. We wipe the lies and confusion off of you. We shut off the outside world and bring you into our nest while we hover and provide. All you need do, sweet one, is sleep and eat and walk with us in the wild forests you know. All you need do is allow it.

It’s all lined up. Waiting for you.

It will be hard, of course it will. There will be challenges. You will hate us sometimes. You will resist because you do not want to be mothered and fathered. You want to be out on your own, morphing into the adult you long to be. But we will be careful, I promise. We will watch that we still allow you your autonomy. We can take your anger, give it to us. We can take your struggles. We will witness you, in your wholeness, without judgment. We will see you, in your wholeness, with loving and forgiving eyes. Do you not know that?

And in the end, for having faced these things with determination and loving resolve, you move on. You move into your adult years with a strength and understanding of yourself you didn’t have before. You recognize your worth. And us, your dad and I and you and even your sisters, are connected more deeply and honestly than ever. We have seen, and will continue to see, each other’s challenges and mortal failings and yet we breathe and love and honour each other anyway. That is family. That is life. It is the ethos we have always lived by. You know and I know that you know.

We are closer than ever. All is well. There are babies to be born and creations to create. That we can be there for that is the very meaning of our lives.

I write that as a pipe dream. Up in smoke. But maybe it’s not? Maybe our relationship goes on somehow? But how? How does it continue to go on? Rudolph Steiner says it goes on if we work on it like we would any relationship. I have to read more because as it is, I don’t see it. I don’t feel it, really.

Your forever loving,

Mamie